Category Archives: Keyword Research

A couple of recent conversations with law firms that deal with Spanish-speaking clients has got me thinking about the need for firms to be prepared for this market. If you open up your practice to those who speak Spanish, you could tap into an entirely new market. You might double the size of your practice. Who knows? Of course, something like this is easier said than done. But to get you started, I am going to give you a bare-bones strategy for promoting your law firm to the Hispanic market.

1. If you are going to promote your legal services to people who speak Spanish, you probably need to actually be able to talk to them. So someone on your staff is going to have to be fluent in Spanish, unless you are just going to refer all that business to another firm. But even then…don’t you need to be able to understand what is being said?

2. Perform Spanish-specific keyword research using Google’s external keyword research tool. The seed keywords should also be in Spanish:

3. Create pages for your web site, or create a new web site altogether, written in Spanish and optimized for the Spanish language keywords. Caution: do not use software or a web site to do your translation! There is a high likelihood that the language will get mangled, which will damage your reputation. If you’re going to do it, do it right.

4. Generate keyword links to your Spanish language pages just like you would your English pages. SEO is still SEO, regardless of the language.

English language SEO is time consuming and has many moving parts. Shifting to a language that you are not familiar with adds to the complexity. If you are already fluent in Spanish, then you’ve got a big advantage over the rest of us.

Another consideration is whether you are promoting to a broad, global Spanish-speaking market or to markets in particular countries or to specific groups of people. There are many variations of the Spanish language, and what works and is acceptable language to one group may not be understood or even considered rude by another group. In general, the best strategy is probably to take a high level, global perspective and try to avoid using language that is specific to any particular group.

So preparing yourself to do business with Spanish-speaking people will require some effort and resources, but it will open your firm up to a whole new market.

For many paid search advertisers, including law firms, 2009 was somewhat of a difficult year due to increased competition for paid search traffic and poor economic conditions; i.e., more advertisers chasing fewer customers.

There is one client of ours with whom we have taken a fairly radical approach. And that is that we are now only bidding on four keywords. I’m really not a big fan of bidding on so few keyword, but looking backward, I can see that if we had concentrated our client’s budget in 2009 on that very small set of keywords, our performance would have been substantially better.

Should we go down to a single keyword? In theory, if you place all of your budget on the number one performing keyword, then all else equal, you will maximize the performance of your paid search account, up to the point where you run out of traffic. So there’s one problem with this strategy. It is best employed in a limited budget situation.

If you have $10 thousand to spend, but bidding on a single or very few keywords only soaks up $1 thousand of your budget, there are likely many more opportunities you could be exploiting by spreading your budget around. But if you only have $1 thousand to start with, then spending the entire $1 thousand on a single keyword makes sense if it provides the best return on your investment.

Another problem is that if you’re all in on a single keyword and conditions change such that the keyword’s performance declines, your overall account performance will decline right along with it. So in our case, I don’t see us dropping to a single keyword. We will stick with the four keyword basket, but you better believe if we start to see a trend of declining performance, we will open up some other keywords.

I guess the core lesson here is the importance of allocating your budget so that more of your budget is consumed by keywords that provide the best return for your advertising dollars. The only way to do that is by carefully examining your historical keyword performance. One caveat is that keyword performance can be affected by where your ads are positioned, so your analysis will be most accurate if your ad positioning is relatively steady across keywords.

Paid search management sometimes requires some imagination, and it definitely requires a watchful eye. Work Media has a lot of experience in the field of search engine marketing, and we’re pretty dang good at it. We would welcome the opportunity to work with you. Contact us at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.

With regards to search engine marketing, targeting the correct keywords is vitally important. One mistake that many businesses, including law firms, make is that they pick an arbitrary keyword or two that they think they should rank for and concentrate their efforts (or the efforts of people they hire) in ranking for that keyword. Don’t make that mistake.

On the other end of the spectrum, some businesses or firms want their web site top-ranked for every possible relevant keyword. Don’t do that, either.

So just what do you do? Let research guide your decisions, and pick keywords that meet three specific criteria.

For any potential keyword, judge its effectiveness based on the following three criteria:

1. Relevance. Relevance refers to how closely the keyword is related to the subject of a web site and the content on a particular page of the site. You want to target keywords with a high degree of relevance.

As an example, if a law firm in Miami has a page on its web site about maritime accidents, then a good keyword for that page might be “Miami maritime accident lawyer.”

2. Search volume. The more search traffic there is for a particular keyword, the more potential traffic the keyword could drive to your web site.

3. Competition. Keywords that have fewer competing web sites offer the opportunity to get your site ranked quicker.

So the three major criteria for any keyword you are considering targeting is relevance, traffic and competition. You will have to use some judgment for the relevance component, but you know your business better than anyone – you know when something is not relevant. Google’s external AdWords keyword tool, found at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, is one of the best sources of finding competitive data. The competition criterion can be based on a couple of things: either the number of results of a Google search for the keyword surrounded by quotes; or the number of results of an “allintitle:” search for the keyword in Google.

So to begin creating your target keyword list, start by using the AdWords external keyword tool referenced above, eliminating the ones that are not relevant, and then ranking them by search volume. Then highlight the ones that are not overly competitive (less than 1,000 competing sites is good). Your highlighted keywords at this point are your best bet for generating targeted organic search engine traffic in a reasonable amount of time. Your chance of ranking for those keywords, and thus generating visits to your web site, is excellent.

Do you perform keyword research before writing a new blog post or article? If you do, we applaud you. If not, you’re not alone. Most lawyers (and Web content creators in general) probably do not. But starting today, you are going to do things differently. Starting today, here is what you are going to do when writing content for the Web:

1. You are going to use Google’s external keyword research tool to find a keyword related to your practice areas and markets that receives some traffic and mild competition.

2. You are going to use that keyword in your content title and prominently in the main text, and if allowed, in bold and in a header (H1) tag.

If you do this, you will have a tremendous advantage over online authors who write without regard to keywords. Why? Because your writing will have focus. It will be specific, and it will very possibly rank highly for your target keyword, helping drive traffic to your web site.

We confess: we do not always do this ourselves. If there is something you want to write about that just doesn’t match up with any particular keyword, then go ahead and write it. But the more you write with specific keywords in mind, the more of your content will show up in search engine results pages. And that’s always a good thing.

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